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“The Expense of Many A Vanished Sight”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

R. J. Kaufmann
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Extract

“In normal times the guillotine, luckily, is not at the disposal of historians.”

Paul Valéry

History is a humanly necessary mode of knowing. Every poised epoch is knit together by the imaginative language it uses to expropriate an organized past from whose qualitative contours it then silently, habitually infers its own nature. History as a fact of communal psychology thus maintains a many-layered referential manifold. This referential manifold must have some kind of emotional legibility and be formally intelligible if it is to serve to subordinate the threatening welter of the no longer relevant. A great deal of meritorious historical research and writing is merely propaedeutic or precritical to the maintenance of this self-validating mirror of each poised epoch. When the mirror no longer throws back usefully intelligible images it must be renewed by honest appraisal of the imaginative syntheses of prior epochs. Such enquiry nowadays tends to bewilderment and to the tenebrous by reason of the richness of the available record. In these latter days the historian is a modifier of pre-established images, his fundamental renovations of vision are few. The mirror stands there; it is bequeathed to us; we need it; it is a strenuous, intellectual task to preserve it at a working level of provocative clarity.

Therefore it is especially desirable that higher historiography escape gossip-mongering about the defenseless dead, or that other form of intrusive projection of current frustrations upon past behaviour, the romanticizing of energy potentials of other eras.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , November 1964 , pp. 6 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1964

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References

1. Rowse, A. L., William Shakespeare: a Biography (Harper and Rowe; New York, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Yeats, W. B., The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats (New York, 1953), pp. 431–32Google Scholar.

3. See Durling, Dwight L., Georgic Tradition in English Poetry (New York, 1935), pp. 193–206Google Scholar; Young, Andrew, The Poet and the Landscape (London, 1962)Google Scholar; and especially Aubin, Robert Arnold, Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (New York, 1936)Google Scholar which contains itemized, chronological bibliographies of “Building” and “Estate” poems for the mid-seventeenth to the late nineteenth century.

4. Rowse, A. L., A New Elizabethan Age? (London, 1952), p. 9Google Scholar.

5. Ibid., p. 13.

6. Rowse, , William Shakespeare, p. 13Google Scholar.

7. Ibid., p. 156.

8. Ibid., p. 105.

9. Ibid., p. vii.

10. Ibid., p. 68.

11. Ibid., p. 47.

12. Ibid., p. 150.

13. Bullough, Geoffrey (ed.), Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (Edinburgh, 1938), II, 136Google Scholar.

14. Neither Rowse's textual allusions nor his notes indicate any familiarity with the interpretive and critical work of approximately the last thirty years, despite the fact that large portions of the book are taken up with rudimentary commentaries on individual plays and with brief set presentations of other dramatists like Lyly, Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher.

15. Rowse, , William Shakespeare, p. 201Google Scholar.

16. Ibid., p. 161.

17. Ibid., p. 127.

18. Besides Peter Quennell's pleasant competing biography, Shakespeare: a Biography (New York, 1963)Google Scholar which includes extensive treatment of the Sonnets and Shakespeare's apparent connections with Southampton and Essex, the anniversary year has seen the publication of five works dealing exclusively with the Sonnets. The most important for the controversial issues absorbing Rowse is Wilson, J. Dover's little book, An Introduction to Shakespeare's Sonnets for Historians and Others (Cambridge, 1964)Google Scholar. The title suggests its genial remedial intentions. It is spirited and exacting. Two modern attempts at critical interpretation of the Sonnets as poetry are: Landry, Hilton, Interpretations of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Berkeley, 1963)Google Scholar. It contains carefully and fully annotated readings of about twenty of the more difficult sonnets and a fascinating chart of the thematic interrelationships of the whole sequence on p. 131. Krieger, Murray, A Window to Criticism: Shakespeare's Sonnets and Modern Poetics (Princeton, 1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is perhaps a little topheavy with methodological considerations but is often rewarding on niceties of usage and structure. Finally, there are two anthologies of earlier criticism of the Sonnets: Herrnstein, Barbara's Shakespeare's Sonnets (Boston, 1964)Google Scholar has a keenminded and succinct introduction; Willen, Gerald and Reed, Victor B., A Casebook on Shakespeare's Sonnets (New York, 1964)Google Scholar, contains an old-spelling text of all the Sonnets and a quite full bibliography of principal critical commentary on the Sonnets ranged by decades from 1800 to 1962. I find Miss Herrnstein's selection of essays preferable, though both volumes are useful. They are paperbacks; all prior volumes noted are hardbacks. Rowse, 's own edition of the Sonnets, Shakespeare's Sonnets (New York, 1964)Google Scholar, like the biography, is published in this country by Harper & Row, runs to 319 pages, and follows the pattern of printing a sonnet a page faced by Rowse's often superfluous, prose paraphrase and accompanying exegesis. The volume is handsome but comparatively expensive. The most judicious and helpful modern discussions of the Sonnets are by Lever, J. W., The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (London, 1956)Google Scholar and Hubler, Edward, The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Princeton, 1952)Google Scholar.